


young one

by cyanica



Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Anakin Skywalker Needs a Hug, Angst, Blood, Captivity, Force Visions, Gen, Gore, Horror, Hurt Ahsoka Tano, Hurt Anakin Skywalker, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Loss of Innocence, Mental Instability, Obi-Wan Kenobi Needs a Hug, Pain, Protective Ahsoka Tano, Protective Obi-Wan Kenobi, Psychological Trauma, Torture, Whump, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:01:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26836378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: She bore witness to the shards of broken mirrored mosaic pieces that consisted of his memories within this hellish limbo, but from where he lay, unmoving, and undeniably, significantly small on the cell’s ground, Anakin didn’t look like Anakin.Ahsoka’s eroding innocence had been slowly disintegrating from her youth ever since her fourteen-year-old self had stepped off that gunship, but this was something else.Or Anakin’s memories of his captivity linger within a prison he’d been kept in, and Ahsoka and Obi-Wan need to find him.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Ahsoka Tano
Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947775
Comments: 2
Kudos: 36
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	young one

**Author's Note:**

> this is actually an old story that i wrote in 2017, yet the original is ew and cringe so i basically rewrote it the way i would now. same story/concept, different writing.
> 
> read tags for tws. the noncon is not detailed/described, but implied, yet i thought i should put the warning there just in case. 
> 
> whumptober prompt day 5: failed escape, rescue (changed slightly to failed rescue).

Ahsoka drew on the Force, a solidifying inhale made its way throughout her lungs, her veins and breathed oxygen into her shaking limbs that trembled with forbidden anxiety. 

_ “Let it soothe you, Padawan. Calm your mind and heart in order to regain control – reality,” _ the masters in the temple would tell her, repeat the phrase a thousand times over like a ritualistic prayer that inexplicably cured what was wrong with the world, her mind, her inability to seek peace in a matter of seconds. It was a mantra she didn’t have the privilege to disobey, to reject as something other than gospel, and one that usually soaked her soul with irrefusable serenity as if foretold, though now the words were as lifeless as any others would be. 

There weren’t  _ words  _ for this sort of thing, there weren’t prayers, there wasn’t peace within such violence – it was emotion, and it was vengeance and it was agony. It was the suffocating aroma of putrid iron assaulting her sense of smell until tears pushed themselves from her eyes; it was crimson ravines of human blood that coated the walls in chaotic splatters of sadistic art; it was Anakin’s clothing signed and burned and shredded to ribbons amongst the cell’s stoned, moldy flooring festering with vile waste and diseased infections.

Ahsoka’s eroding innocence had been slowly disintegrating from her young, unbelievably blood-tainted hands since the moment her fourteen-year-old self had stepped off the gunship into a war zone, but  _ this  _ was something else – something that made her question if there was enough of herself to come back to, once that war and torture and fighting had ceased into ash. It made her question that, if she were to become someone other than who she was, that someone would be something of darkness and of tainted purity and retribution for the lives that had taken from her, both via the corruption of Ahsoka Tano and the death of Anakin Skywalker.

But that wasn’t right, either.

Losing herself wouldn’t help anyone, and though she was struggling to find the will to care about her original reasons anymore, she wouldn’t allow herself to do that – not when there was blood on the walls, on her hands, in her veins, and Anakin Skywalker was lost himself.

Ahsoka felt, rather, than saw Obi-Wan centre himself beside her, doing a marvelous job of keeping his breathing still, face from paling as if he’d practiced the art of masquerading, of lying, an awful amount of times – and for that Ahsoka was almost jealous.

She touched a shaking, white-knuckled hand to the cremated wall to deepen the connection of herself to the memories that lingered within this room like ghosts. Her fingers skimmed over a small section of the concrete, traces of dried vermillion faking off onto her palm, the jaggedcermant leaving indentations within her flesh, making nausea grow like an infection devouring her insides. She knew by doing this – heightening the connection, reliving memories that belong to another’s mind in a place like this one – Ahsoka would be amplifying the vision of the past to a state where one often fell into catatonia and insanity, but finding Anakin was who she’d risk it all for, and she knew Obi-Wan, despite himself, was not going to disagree. Ahsoka would live amongst this agony of a cell, reliving her master’s pain for eons, until the stars above them had died out and rebirthed themselves anew, if it meant he’d be found, if it meant he’d be safe. 

That kind of attachment – of love – was dangerous, Ahsoka knew: to  _ need  _ someone in the way she needed Anakin – but it also made solidifying sense. It was absolution, and she was okay with that, even though she shouldn't have been.

The Force impacted her breakable mind and soul with enough energy and emotion combined, it felt like being smashed into a meteorite traveling at lightspeed while also burning through space at an unimaginable degree of heat. She was disintegrating into charred smithereens of ash and stardust faster than the time it took for the universe to expand into the abyss of the unknown beyond, and it  _ screamed _ .

There were more agonized feelings within the air than she could comprehend – than she’d ever thought existed – and they all erupted within her eardrums like explosions of fire and lava and rainbow gasoline like a chorus of dead souls hurtling through an undeniable living hell that existed in this very lucid, very real plane of existence. 

She was suddenly a conduit for extraterrestrial wavelengths of pure, embodied agony. She could feel behind the backs of her pulsing eyeballs that there was intangible fire radiated like a blinding, detonating sun that tore all these broken pieces of the universe apart like a fragmented mosaic – like the crumbling cremated wall of Anakin’s prison. The starlight became –  _ consumed – _ her. A thousand voices through the Force’s radiation screamed cries of death through her insignificant, unbelievably small, young mind.

Every dissipating lifeforce that had ever existed within this prison of torture was crying, burning within her head as if supernovas were falling like dying stars from the grace of space into an expanse of Ahsoka’s consciousness; as if their thousands of deaths at the hands of these inhumane  _ monsters  _ were simultaneously being pulled into a focal point onto her suddenly very child-like being, and Ahsoka could taste their asphyxiating breaths on her tongue, feel blazing heat from flaying flesh spread like wildfire throughout her veins. The overwhelming sensation of uncontrolled, tortured polarisation of many, many beings was causing the neurons in her brain to collapse, the muscles to rot alarmingly, and her body to completely and irreversibly collapse alongside those who had already perished into smithereens before her within the same existence of this hell. 

Burning flesh and the putrid smell of draining blood was smothering the air, as it did before, though with the Force assaulting her mind like it was made of nothingness, Ahsoka could see the smells, taste the pain, live the deaths of too many  _ toomanytoomany  _ over and over again for the rest of infinity. The remains of abandoned, flayed flesh were settling amongst her airways with every hyperventilative breath, choking rotting meat and skin and bone marrow down inside her until it became her. The pain of thousands rotted through to her lungs, demanded agony and torture be felt in its wake, and despreately, fanatically, Ahsoka reached out to Obi-Wan’s gravitating essences beside her within the unifying, corrupted Force. She knew Obi-Wan could feel it too, heavy in the deranged air like aflamed pollution tainting all that they were. 

She wondered if he was dying just as she was. If he was choking on it – that rotting smell of metallic knives and burning flesh becoming engulfed by flame as human skin turned a blackened, festering wound, until no flesh remained at all, and had become completely consumed by smoldering iron.

Through it all, she counted maybe at least several beings' voices tearing their vocal cords apart, ripping their own throats up from the inside as if their flesh was merely paper. Their seemingly endless ceasing cries exploded within her eardrums, defying the construct of language as they created their own cries of death, prayers of pure deathful mercy through bloodied mouths and gasps that were the epitome of whispered screams. Somewhere between all the chaos and her own mind delving into something nonexistent, Ahsoka could swear on her life, Anakin's voice was among them.

But the voices weren't the only things she bore witness to, oh  _ gods _ . Instruments of insidious intent slashed through flesh, shattering bone once it reached the core, smashed teeth apart into crumbling shards of broken cartilage, twisted nails apart from blacked fingertips, and punctured skin so violently that the flesh had become entirely mutilated and deformed, resembling nothing of what it once had been. 

_ Please, gods – _

This was it, her breaking point. Just like the others, just like Anakin, she would die here as if it was someone foretold, written into the stars in the same way unchangeable destiny was. Her soul was condemned here, to living amongst the purgatory of lost victims that would never ascend into the Force’s serenity, if only to replay their deaths within the endless loops of an eternal ouroboros until the universe had reached the end of infinity, only to renew itself again.

Her mouth screamed underneath the cascade of thick blood weeping for the spaces where teeth used to be, her legs weighed down as if they were solid lead that had plunged into an inescapable seastorm like a drowning anchor, and her eyes inside her skull burned like they'd been washed with fiery, sulfuric acid that could rival the essences of molten lava.

_ Please, please, stop, oh gods _ , she thinks she may have screamed.

The Force collided into her mind like a broken glass kaleidoscope, each prism of chaotic starlight existing as a different relic of someone’s memory who bore witness as a captive. Desperately, as if she were drowning in all that was evil and deranged and agonized and  _ wrong _ , Ahsoka searched for Anakin’s solidifying presence within the mayhem.

_ There _ .

She found the matching energy, the pattern of familiarity that was Anakin Skywalker’s ephemeral wavelength of life throughout the supernatural essence of the unifying Force – though when she reached out a begging hand if she were grasping for a line of life, something wasn’t right. The stardust that had anciently made up Anakin Skywalker had morphed into something different, something Ahsoka didn’t recognise. 

She bore witness to the shards of broken mirrored mosaic pieces that consisted of his memories within this hellish limbo, but from where he lay, unclothed, unmoving, and undeniably, significantly small, Anakin didn’t look like Anakin.

The screaming died into agonising, pitiful prayers of death, and blood drained in dripping puddles rather than splattering against the walls, and the body lying upon the concrete had suddenly become inexplicably unmoving in a way that defied everything she had ever known about him. He lay in these gallows of eternal purgatory as if rapture was that of fairy tales, as if saviour was a lie, and  _ this _ was all there was. He had condemned himself broken, or they had made him so.

There was a sense of something so humiliatingly dehumanizing lingering within every wave-link through their connection to each other and their anchors in the Force. It was unstoppable, uncontrollable, unwanted and left the atmosphere broken when the pressure throughout the air was released, and Ahsoka suddenly wished for nothing more than for the undying screams to plague her ears, for the human lifeforce to taint her being entirely crimson. 

Anything was better than Anakin's silent weeping as he lay unmoving, bloodied on the floor.

Her mind refused to put the pieces together. Somehow the constructed mosaic of fragmented information and memories was better than the knowing, and  _ gods _ , that was selfish and evil and wrong – but the darkness in which she could masquerade with the mind of a child, of someone who had not seen as much as she had, lived as long as she had lived, were damaged in the ways she were damaged, was safer. 

Engulfing shame and disgrace were infecting her insides, her soul, like a carcinogenic curse spreading poisonous disease throughout all she was, and Anakin’s lingering presence felt the same.

As if in mockery from a higher power laughing down on them all, her screaming voice had finally joined all the others, creating an ungodly symphony of nothing but agony.

When Ahsoka opened her eyes, the world had changed. Instead of being trapped inside that awful prison of foreign memories that made her want to bleed in the way they had bled, she had simply collapsed in Obi-Wan’s arms as if she deserved salvation. 

Her senses came back to her in pounding waves like oceanic waters over stormy seas, and there was Obi-Wan, urging her to come back to reality a little too desperately, too humanly. He shook her lightly, calling her name from above, and the words floated into her mind as they surpassed all that had rotted and died and bled while she’d been somewhere else, not of this universe. 

"What was that?" She choked out, tongue as thick as lead with a mouth that ached of mercury.

Obi-Wan swallowed hard, suppressing something vile, she realized. He turned away, unable to look at her, nor anything else in the room, and she couldn't blame him. 

"Horrible things have happened here,” was all Obi-Wan whispered, face bloodless and terribly ill as he choked the words out that defied someone who was always so terribly well put together. 

She had known, for of course she had. He didn't have to say it, she wouldn’t make him say the words to solidify what they couldn’t ignore for the sake of their own sanity; but this wasn’t  _ right _ . 

"I... I don't understand, Master." Ahsoka said, refusing to put the pieces back together despite the fact she knew how to, in the same way she could block firefight, stitch together broken flesh of that of her brothers, or pray to the intangible essence of light that was the unifying, undying Force.

Maybe Obi-Wan knew this, too. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe they were lying to themselves when they believed they didn't understand, because that made it easier. 

"Now is not the time, young one," he said, yet she had never felt so old. “He’s not here anymore. Let’s go.”


End file.
